I'm leaving academia.

There are many ways to tell this story. Here are six of them.

November 2021.

I am on the upper deck of a crowded city bus, chugging through rush hour traffic, when my phone pings with a barrage of WhatsApp messages. It’s my friend Anna, who also did her PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin, who’s also ginger and queer, who also ended up working in UK academia after graduation despite never planning on that. She is a rock, and a mirror. “I sit down to do my research and I panic,” she says. “I don’t want to do this. I think I have to leave.”

Anxiety about research is a common refrain for most academics, and especially for those who got into this career because we wanted to be university-level teachers and have had to make ourselves researchers to achieve that. And, there is a profound difference between periodically succumbing to impostor narratives and knowing that the act of performing “researcher” will break you. Even then, I think I understood this distinction. “I don’t like doing research,” I told Anna, “but it doesn’t make me panic.” She would say later that this was a moment of clarity for her. It wasn’t for me. Not yet.

Anna is now a community development administrator in a small town, where she lives with her partner and their dog, which I tell you so you know this story has a happy ending. Serendipitously, two years later, I ended up at a landing near Borough Market in London overlooking the Thames, and I remembered suddenly Anna and I sitting there on a stone slab while her life was reshaping itself around her, me holding her as she cried. Later we sat outside her flat and she did the same for me, roles reversed. At the time, I thought I was releasing some of the stress that came from moving overseas and starting a new job in a strange land. And I was, and also, I’m not so sure that was all I was doing.

I’ve still never felt panic about research. But that’s not to say it doesn’t incite a visceral reaction in me. It started when I did my PhD fieldwork, when the weight of the work left me leaning against the wall of a subway train in Berlin and fighting with myself to “get off, go to your interview, get off.” I had sublet an apartment and I was so deeply grateful it was large enough to have a separate living area; living prone on the couch in between appointments felt less pathetic than living in bed, even if the two states were functionally the same. Thinking about research wasn’t an anxious thing. There wasn’t friction. Instead, there was an emptiness, an absence, that over time evolved into a deep sadness.

Here is what I mean: I receive multiple emails a week about research grant opportunities, workshops for getting grants, institutional support for grant applications, and so on in a similar fashion. I used to just delete these. I knew, somehow, that they weren’t for me, and it was an easy way to keep my inbox clean. Nowadays, however, these emails feel like sinking into a pool of water that’s just a little too cold—not enough to shock or refresh and not enough to really bother, but enough to be uncomfortable. The question is not how to change the temperature of the water, but how long you will make yourself deal with it before getting out. The feeling is a reminder that my employer only wants one part of me, and it’s the part of me I knew when I started this job that I didn’t like, even as I have made myself live with it.

It is time to get out, the water coaxes. It is time to get out.

—

After I defended my dissertation prospectus, I wrote that dissertating was kind of like doing the Kjeragbolten hike in Norway. After the first year post-PhD, I wrote that being on the tenure track in a new country was kind of like hiking mountains in the Faroe Islands. Visiting cold, harsh places is at least half of my personality, which is maybe also why I felt drawn toward academia as a career.

Regardless, I do think there’s merit in viewing one’s academic career progression as a kind of trek. Others will call on the old “marathon not sprint” adage, but I’ve never run a marathon and that kind of endurance doesn’t resonate with me. I have a short attention span; I prefer sharp pains; elevation changes are really a must. There is value in attaining a different vantage point.

In south Iceland, two years into my job, I walked the edge of a glacier and felt lost. Physically, I wasn’t: there was a small restaurant on the shore that always remained in view. But I couldn’t connect with the wind, the gravel, the ice. I couldn’t manage to ground myself. On the way to the glacier, I’d stopped at waterfalls, vistas, and rock formations; I’d examined wildflowers; I’d played fetch with a dog at its demand. I had hopped from each moment of lightness to the next, barely putting my feet down. This, too, was like academia for me: searching for dopamine hits in a sea of “is this what it is? is this all it will ever be?”

And then, something not like academia at all: a few days prior, I’d left the main road and driven up into the highlands in the center of the island. The roads here are gravel, many are poorly marked, and all come with restrictions on what kinds of cars can drive on them. After an hour or so of bumping about on my SUV’s shaky suspension, I suddenly caught a gleam from the mountains in the distance. It was a cloudy day, but the thing shone. Language came to mind, language for something I’d never yet seen in person, and it rose out of me: “GLACIER.” I proceeded to spend the rest of the drive staring at the ice sheet as it loomed closer and closer before me, wonder coursing through me, giddiness living with anticipation in my throat.

I think this is called joy. It is what academia is not, for me. And I don’t dream of labor, but work must nevertheless exist in a form other than misery. This I must believe.

I have better photos, but this is the moment.

—

November 2023.

If you don’t know me, I’m a US-trained political scientist who landed an assistant professor gig at a UK university. I am frequently very loud on the internet about what that experience has been like. Despite spending most of my adult life at large research institutions, I identify strongly as a liberal arts student, and this formative experience in my late teens and early 20s continues to shape my relationship with academia.

I went to a tiny college in the Midwest with people who were artistic in every possible sense of that word, including some incredibly talented musicians. One wrote a song called “On the Steps of Old Main” that is still sometimes used in college marketing materials. A lyric from it resounded in my head as I stepped onto campus for the first time in almost 10 years: “It feels like a home’s been built in my soul.”

The lyric echoed as I moved around Knox College for the next two days. I was there as a researcher, and as a success story. Todd, my former German professor and longtime supporter, had arranged a session with Alumni Relations and a group of current students interested in learning about trajectories after Knox. Knox students are candid and conversational, and I answered honestly when asked about my career trajectory after graduation (winding; financially uncertain) and things I would’ve done differently in college knowing what I know now (take a much wider variety of classes; break up with my shitty boyfriend sooner). Todd shared stories about my performance in the first German class I took with him, which I genuinely did not remember; he knew every student’s name. Later I sat in on a fairytale literature class taught by my former union comrade Brandy, whom I know from grad school and who now teaches at Knox because the world is so small. She’d structured the class around a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, the students were boisterous and loud and so meticulously engaged, and all the nerve endings in my nerd brain sang.

Before I left, I sat with Todd in his office and filled out reimbursement paperwork. I had given a research talk on my in-progress book manuscript; we had wandered through the new buildings on campus and observed how this special, special place had grown. He is now a full professor, but he said, “You are already a more successful academic than I have ever been.” But I have watched him teach, and I have seen the fruits of his intensive labors to improve the student experience, and this statement broke me. Knox is where I learned that academics are, first and foremost, teachers. This is still the standard I carry with me. This is still the ethos I work to bring into my hundred-person classrooms, to my students socialized in rigid and authoritarian environments, to a department culture wherein, in the words of one coworker, some teachers “do everything they can to avoid teaching.”

A friend tells me I am allowed to grieve leaving academia behind, but the only time I feel compelled to do so is as I am driving away from Knox (which I cannot recommend, as crying and dealing with Chicagoland drivers do not mix). So much of my belief that academia can be good—that higher education can be something otherwise—comes from this place, even as I also hold space for the real misogyny and racism and harm that my alma mater has perpetrated and, I am sure, that it continues to enact in new ways. Visiting again has only renewed that belief, which makes letting go of that possible future for myself an even rawer act. I am supposedly a stellar academic, but I cannot produce the knowledge of how to sit with this dream, receding behind me.

—

April 2024.

Sutina suggests that this time, we write our offerings on rice paper. Built off of a joke about throwing people who have wronged us into the harbor, I have now led two rage rituals at academic conferences taking place near large bodies of water. In a trusted circle of loved ones, we name our bullies and oppressors and release them to the sea. Sutina’s suggested modification is brilliant, as the rice paper will dissolve in the water rather than disintegrating into pulp like wood-based paper—a true symbolic obliteration. The refrain goes: “The harm done to you is real, but it no longer holds power over you.”

I have an ulterior motive at the San Francisco bay, and it is a privilege of being the ritual architect that I get to keep this to myself until the last moment. To allow equal space for everyone, we ask that each person offer up at most three individuals or entities. I only have one, and I write in Sharpie, “my academic career.” In my head, naming it makes it real, and with it all my fears. I voice these too: that removing myself from academic spaces will mean losing the friends I have made there. Despite the work I’ve done to disconnect my self-worth from my career, it is still difficult for me to trust that bonds built through my career could last outside of it.

I think I needn’t worry. No one tries to convince me to rethink my decision. No one questions it. There are no “buts” offered, and that is how I know. I have shredded my rice paper into tiny shards behind my back as I’ve spoken, so I have only scraps to throw into the bay, but something about that, too, feels right. As we look out at the sunset, Liam, who kindly labored over my (now shelved) academic book proposal, says, “I’ll read your non-academic book.” That, more than anything, is a current beneath me as I ascend.

I tell them all that my departure may feel sudden from the outside, but it’s not sudden for me. Liam asks, “When did you decide?” “February,” I tell him. “And last year. And a year before that.” I share that I don’t know what’s next, beyond moving back to the States. There is a real thrill to that uncertainty, which I choose to imagine, instead, as possibility.

Serendipitously, one of my dearest friends, who transitioned out of academia after grad school, happens to be in the Bay Area for a wedding. Ben is the first person I told when I knew I was leaving, time and time again, and it is refreshing to talk with him about old news. Ever pragmatic, he offers, “Tell me your ideas,” and I spitball a few: editing work, teaching or training work, running away to live in a cave in the woods (a joke, but only just). I begin the predictable “going to work for a think tank” narrative before dismissing it—I am confident I want none of this—and I wonder, afterwards, why I felt the need to even bring it up; he didn’t. The options paraded for non-academic jobs, to the extent these are discussed at all within the ivory tower, all assume the most valuable and valued skills we have are research-related. We must want to continue doing either the substantive or technical aspects of our jobs, the refrain suggests, because otherwise what was this for?

But this is not the song I want to sing. My song includes a verse about the music professor from Knox who left her job to make jam. The bridge tells of the US politics PhD candidate who decided, instead, to teach high school. For the month of March, I did an experiment: no research, and using that time instead to devote extra energy to supporting and mentoring students. Doing this didn’t heal my relationship with my job, but it made me feel lighter. Some social scientist will pop up to wag a finger about control groups and treatment bias, but I have never cared much for causality when feeling is how we actually make sense of our worlds. “Did you feel better because of the lack of research or because of the increase in teaching and mentoring?” Ben asks. Both.

Despite my job title of “assistant professor,” I have referred to myself for a while as a teacher and writer, first and foremost. I think I will always be those things. There are endless configurations of the constellation of skills embedded in those two vast and weighty tasks. I have options. I have hope.

—

There is a version of this story in which I resign because UK higher education is dying and I don’t believe the government has any interest in saving it. The timing does appear auspicious. At the end of January 2024, I interviewed for a faculty position at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. A few weeks prior, we in my department at Nottingham had been informed that the university was experiencing a budgetary crisis and all non-pay spending was henceforth suspended. The academic job market does not move this quickly—I had done my first-round interview for the Boston position back in November—but things do, nevertheless, seem to line up.

And I won’t lie: my body does read the announcement of financial calamity as the final nail in the coffin of my academic career—in the UK, at least. Every subsequent staff email has confirmed that assessment for me. The situation will not improve in the near future, and hiring will remain frozen for the 2024–25 fiscal year. There will be no redundancies before July, but after that the university will have to consider the “size and shape” of its workforce. A senior coworker who makes far and away the highest salary in the department and has been on the verge of retirement for years has decided to take the plunge.

Nottingham has not featured in news headlines the way the University of Kent has, with its closure of six degree programs, or the way the University of Lincoln has, with its 200+ redundancies, or the way the University of Essex has, with its proposed extension of the academic year to 45 weeks. This is one way I know this is a sector-wide problem, not an institutional-level issue: just because we haven’t heard about the active dismantling of a university doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. I also know because I’ve been on the picket lines more or less since I arrived in the UK, fighting a fight over pensions (which I don’t care about) and casualization and fair pay (which I do), in which staff experienced a crushing defeat in 2023 but is nowhere near over. I know that cruelty is the point, that the financial situation of the UK will not be magically reversed by a Labour government, that the reliance on international students to prop up the sector cannot continue under the hostile environment, the thorny colonial dynamics of this practice notwithstanding. For years I have advised, quietly at first but with increasing adamancy, that no one without personal reasons for being in the UK should get involved in higher education here, either as a student or a teacher. The way out of the water cannot be found on a sinking ship.

All of these things make it easier to leave. It’s true. But the structural is not the personal, not always. The personal, for me, is a disjuncture I’ve known since grad school but chosen to ignore, and realistically since before then, when I’d chipped away at parts of myself to soothe the perpetual student within me. It’s that student who knew school was a place where I could rely on praise, where I would be told I was good and creative and clever. It’s that child who sought validation and gravitated toward the only place she found it.

In August 2023, I am on sabbatical, one true perk of this job that I suspect will be done away with going forward as part of the general financial chaos. I am sitting at my computer. The night is black, and rain pounds against the window. In my head, a story is waiting. Have you ever felt absolutely compelled to do something, like everything in your being is attuned to that act of expression and to deny it any longer would be to commit an act of self-harm? If not, this may not make sense. Concurrently, I am working on the proposal for my first academic book, something I have found I must pull out of me like hair wound round a drain. Meanwhile, this other story stands unassuming before the door of my brain, nothing academic about it at all. It has been standing there since I was a girl. It knocks gently, something it has done countless times before, and asks, “Will you let me out? What if you let me out?”

It has taken me two years to drag my mind to a place where it feels as though it could produce an academic book proposal. It has taken me weeks to write 8 pages, and with encouragement from friends and mentors, I feel I am almost ready to submit it to publishers. I have discovered a way to write it that feels as authentic as I can make it and still have it suit an academic press. I should be making my final edits. Instead, fingers trembling, I open a blank document, let the cursor flash, and open the door.

(Kazuo Ishiguro writes, “Stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel that way to you?”)

During my fieldwork, I had to force, and at times fake, the research impulse. In this dark night, I find 25,000 words of a new story. It is only a beginning.

This may not make sense to you, but in my bones, I am vibrating. I know what I have done.

—

February 2014.

My first job out of college was making coffee for law students and rich people. I bounced from this to doing social media for a wine shop, which I tried and failed to spin into a marketing consultancy for various mind-altering beverage spots around Washington, DC. I inhabited a nightlife I had only seen previously on television, and the novelty was exciting but didn’t take long to wear off. The tension of cobbling together part-time jobs and freelance gigs while my bank account dwindled contributed to this. So when I finally landed a short-term contract position at a research institute, the only thing I could think of was relief. It did not occur to me until I stepped off the shuttle from the subway station and my entire body relaxed that the institute was located on a university campus. (The perpetual student, validated, affirmed.)

I had figured I would come to DC and end up doing an MA in public policy or foreign affairs before heading to the Hill. This is a common narrative among political science majors in the US, and it was a path I could conceptualize and understand. It also let me ignore an observation that had surprised me. During my senior year of undergrad, I had served as a teaching assistant and found that I quite liked teaching. I had always assumed I wouldn’t, and this was in fact why I’d written off applying to PhD programs, which felt like a natural choice for a perpetual student but which I understood, naïvely, to be primarily about preparing students for what I thought, naïvely, was a teaching career. I am a slow learner and resistant to change, so it would take me a year to decide PhD programs actually were for me. (It would take me several more years to fully wrap my head around the fact that PhD programs don’t teach you how to teach and in fact socialize you to devalue teaching in favor of research.)

When I went on the academic job market the first time, I vowed to myself that I would not apply to any jobs at R1 (research-intensive) universities. I’d had enough exposure to that world through my PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to know it didn’t align with my priorities. I kept that vow more or less as far as the US went, but I was also applying to jobs at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to increase my chances in a market that was even worse than usual, I applied to positions in Canada and various European countries. In those cases, I did apply to research universities, knowing in vague terms that the research environments in the US and elsewhere were different but not much beyond that. It turns out they’re the same in the way that bothers me most: the exaltation of research to the detriment and devaluation of teaching.

I went on the academic job market again in the 2023–24 cycle. This time, I chose to be extremely particular, a privilege I felt I could afford myself because I was not staring down the barrel of the unemployment gun. I applied to exactly three jobs, in places where I thought I would genuinely like to live, at institutions where I thought I would genuinely like to work. (For comparison, I had applied to 50 back in 2020–21, which is a low number as the US academic market goes.) One job was a bad fit substantively, but I tried anyway because the institution and city appealed. I got interviews for the other two and a flyout for one of those. In the end, it just didn’t pan out.

My activist friends would say this is a product of too few jobs for too few people in the context of an underfunded and increasingly marketized higher education sector. My conservative Christian father would say (and has said) it’s because the Lord doesn’t want me to live in Boston, Massachusetts. I prefer, instead, to take my cues from witchcraft and think of signs not as appearing to us but as being constantly available to fashion into stories we can choose to hear. In other words, if this were a sign, would I want to pay attention to it?

My first experience on the academic job market was not kind to me, and I was fully prepared for this second outing to wreck me in similar ways. My friend Gia, who saw me through the first time with nighttime deliveries of ice cream and frozen burritos, now reaches out from across the sea. Gia is one of the most empathetic people I know; she feels everything in the pit of her belly. “How are you doing?” she asks, somewhat warily. I can only ever be 100% honest with her. “I am fine, and I mean that,” I say. I was. I am. I am a slow learner, but at this point I have been telling myself there are other options for me for four years instead of one, and I have finally come to believe it.

When I don’t get the UMass–Boston job, I cry for a grand total of 30 seconds. It is less an expression of sorrow or defeat than it is a natural movement of energy through the body. I wipe my eyes, roll my shoulders back, and open a new document. On the inside of my left elbow I have a tattoo of a single phrase in French, partly a subtle nod to a silly British TV show I adore and partly a love letter to the most curious, creative components of my younger self, who chose to learn French for no reason other than that she wanted to and believed she could. Onwards, my brain whispers. Allons-y.

—

March 2023.

I meet a former member of my dissertation committee for a drink at a hotel bar in Montreal. It is the first time we’ve seen each other since I graduated and embarked for the UK. I’m done with it, I tell her. I’m going to apply to jobs back in the US. Would you please write me a reference letter?

By this point, it has hit me hard that I can count on one hand the number of acquaintances in my academic generation—those who got their PhDs within the last few years—who are not either in a new job, actively seeking a new job, or extremely discontented with their current job but feeling trapped in it. I have a large academic network, so this is not an insignificant number of discontented people. It does raise questions of more fundamental problems with academia, with our hiring processes, with what our jobs do to people. With how much we feel compelled to settle.

But back to the conversation. My former committee member is kind and encouraging. She has also inferred from my words some degree of self-doubt on my part. This has been a continual point of tension for us throughout our professional relationship, which I believe stems from our different orientations toward what an academic career is. (She views herself primarily as a researcher; I do not.) She stresses that if I can just make it to tenure, I will feel so much better about my job. She bases this on her own experience, and I remind myself that we mustn’t assume our emotional reactions translate for all people. I try to explain to her that tenure doesn’t exist in the UK, but this is a difficult thing for US academics to grasp and it’s beside the point anyway. “You can do this, you know,” she says. “You really can.” But “can” is different than “want,” and “can” for her implies “be a researcher.” “I do believe that,” I tell her, mostly to shut this line of conversation down. She leaves shortly thereafter.

One way this story will be narrated, I am sure, is as a cautionary tale of impostor syndrome winning out. I think my publication list, conference invitations, and consulting record undermine this narrative well enough, and indeed it is these things that make my framing of myself as Not a Researcher difficult for some to swallow. The realities that I study a topical subject, like to fit in, and have various neurospicy brain things that make me fast and efficient are harder to explain concisely and jive less well with the dominant notion of academia (and especially academic research) as a calling, so they have been and will be overlooked if not outright dismissed. That’s fine, I suppose. People are entitled to tell the stories that serve them best.

And so, you may ask, how do mine serve me? At the end of the day, I relish control and want to retain oversight of how my own life is understood, even as I recognize the futility of that task. In the event something I say resonates with someone else, which I have found to frequently be the case with my writings about my academic journey, I may also feel less abnormal or alone.

But mostly, there’s the knocking in my brain. I do not know how not to put my own story down in writing. It is the only way I’ve ever made sense of how to be.

—

April 2024.

The UK academic year is characterized by a long Easter break, and the academic conference that’s brought me to California falls during that break. It’s rare I get the chance to fly halfway around the world on someone else’s dime, so I decide to stay an extra week. I drive south to Big Basin, east to Yosemite, and then back to Tomales Point, about an hour north of the Bay Area. Jutting out into the sea on a narrow finger of orange rock, Tomales Point is only accessible via a 5–mile hike. I begin it on a particularly foggy morning, a veil of mist descending so heavily over the trees that I can’t see them until they’re right on top of me. Around me is a crashing I come to realize isn’t distant traffic, but the nearby sea. I grew up on the Great Plains, and when I moved to Wisconsin after my stint in Washington, DC, a coworker from the Pacific Northwest asked me if I wouldn’t miss the ocean. “No,” I said—the thought hadn’t even occurred to me then. I think I am finally beginning to understand what she meant. On the other side of the fog are waves, waves I must believe I will eventually see.

The trail winds through wildflower meadows, narrow muddy divots, and a tule elk preserve. The fog stays thick, which I feel most strongly in the dampness from my hair dripping down the collar of my shirt. As the ground turns to sand, I encounter a group of trail runners coming back the other direction. “It’s worth it at the end,” one says. The terrain is fairly flat, but there is instance after instance of what hikers call false summits, or moments you see in the distance that you think must be the end of the trail, only for it to continue on once you get there. I choose to trust the runners, along with the pictures I’ve seen online that brought me here in the first place, and I press onward.

Suddenly the trail diverges, side paths appearing and shooting off in all directions into the fog. There is no one else here, I am in no rush, and if I’m reading my map correctly, I must be close to the end anyway. I choose a path to the left and follow it, only for it to end abruptly as the edge of a cliff comes into view. Stories below me, the most ferocious waves I have ever personally encountered batter the rock. The sea churns, pulses, wrecks itself against the peninsula only to reform as the same pure essence. It picks itself up and starts the dance again. It is unabashedly, marvelously alive.

In my throat is a giddiness, knocking, that I release and that comes out as laughter. I feel I could stay here forever. This is deeply impractical: I have an old ankle injury that likes to act up around mile 8 of any excursion, which I know I will hit on the way back. There is no avoidance of that pain in this situation, only delay. But oh, is it worth it.

Back in my rental car, I stop at a small roadside market for lunch. Lurking in the back of the fridge is something I can scarcely believe I’ve found in northern California: a can of peach kombucha manufactured by a café in Madison, Wisconsin that sat on the edge of campus. I have never been quiet about disliking my graduate school experience or my PhD-granting institution, nor about the fiercest group of forever friends I met there and the beauty of living in that city for six years. And here, on what feels like the edge of the world, the last inch of a precipice, is a small treat I used to enjoy. Here is a reminder that I will carry the truly lovely parts of this experience with me wherever I go.

Before I head to the airport, I buy a picnic breakfast and stop at Lands End, the park in western San Francisco that affords fantastic views of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. From here I can look east to where the shards of my rice paper academic career have dissolved into the water. It has only been a week, but I know, with a profound sense of peace, that it is better left there. It can stay in the water without me. I will watch the waves crash from the shore.

Every time I’ve returned from the US to the UK since moving here, I’ve thrown up, with two exceptions. The first was after an extended trip around the northeast during my sabbatical, which had been mostly work but ended with a couple days of pleasure in New York City. I thought my body may have finally resigned itself to the back and forth only to find I could barely get out of bed for about a month. I scared myself so thoroughly that I referred myself to two different mental health services, the act of which in and of itself felt like a moment of healing, of choosing myself.

The second was this last time, after returning from California. Waiting for the train at King’s Cross, my stomach was hungry but settled; I was tired but would be fine after a good night’s rest. I claim no causality, but I make sense of it this way. At the Bay, I had chosen myself so utterly that I had obliterated all resistance. There was nothing to exorcise. By leaving academia, I was and am, finally, me.

Allons-y.